Even getting rid of religion, people still love their teleology, whether its birthers, truthers…. etc… who see agency in everything. And I think it would take a very extraordinary person to be able to overcome that. Be like fighting an addiction, I would imagine… for some.

At CFI the other day a woman came in, interested in transhumanism. I usually point those folks to the meetup group, but she wanted to talk…. about how she was already transhuman, as the government had been experimenting on her since she was an embryo. Definitely… the far end of the spectrum, but much more common than you might think. I get more moderate versions fairly regularly at atheist meetups. Conspiracies everywhere, it seems.

Be that as it may, there’s a difference between predisposition and destiny. Even people who are instinctively disposed to look for meaning can learn, through education and reasoned argument, that there’s no intelligible meaning out there waiting to be found. Coming to terms with aspects of reality that initially seem distasteful or counterintuitive is a normal part of intellectual maturation.

The latter are sometimes called agnostics…. more often, they call themselves spiritual. There are a lot of them. As a scientist, you might be unfamiliar, as someone who spent many years in the Arts, I’m more than a little familiar with the different varieties of black cats.

Consider that there were once a vast majority of people who were neurologically predisposed to be skeptical that had to learn to function in a god-bothered society. I suppose a world without religion would just be the opposite – with a group of people people paying lip-service to science and skepticism, whilst all the time secretly avoiding black cats and broken mirrors.